Former Prime Minister Helen Clark has praised former United Nations Secretary-General and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Kofi Annan, following his death.
Mr Annan, 80, died in the early hours of Saturday morning (local time) in Switzerland, where he was receiving medical care for a short illness.
Ms Clark first met Mr Annan when he visited New Zealand in 2000.
"In my opinion, he was the greatest Secretary General of the UN since Dag Hammarskjöld," she told Newshub.
"He was a charismatic man. He was a very humble man, softly spoken, but he always had something very powerful to say."
She said Mr Annan was revered in Africa and made his mark around the world as a man of peace.
He was appointed Secretary-General, the top UN post, in December 1996 and served until the end of 2006. During that time, Mr Annan and the UN were recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize.
However, Mr Annan was unable to bring peace to Syria and bring to rest the failures of diplomacy in Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, Cyprus, Somalia and Iraq.
"The low point for him would have been the intervention in Iraq by the United States and the United Kingdom and a very tiny number of other countries," Ms Clark said.
"He saw that invasion as illegal, he spoke against it and he was given a very hard time."
After leaving the UN he founded the Kofi Annan Foundation, and more recently began leading a UN commission investigating the Rohingya crisis.
Newshub.
